How large or involved of a project is this going to be?
Honestly, this sounds a bit like the Wolves & Caraboo problem that all beginning computer science students do. *grin*
There are several features in Perl that make doing things like this fun. Vroom mentioned several of them. I would include on this Perl's easy to use
object oriented syntax if you actually plan to make this a large project. Correctlty designed, it would make loading different species into the simulation easier,
running controled experiments on your model easier, and compairing results to a control run easier.
If you run in to any specific issues, please stop back!
Crulx